“Sanders, quoting Dr. Martin Luther King (‘We all too often have socialism for the rich and rugged free market capitalism for the poor’), transformed the word ‘socialism’ from a right-wing epithet into a useful tool for exposing right-wing hypocrisy. ‘President Trump and his fellow oligarchs,’ Bernie observed, ‘hate democratic socialism because it benefits working people, but they absolutely love corporate socialism’.”

—CommonDreams

Dr. King spoke truth of course, and by extension so did Senator Sanders a week ago. But socialism for plutocrats and corporations is only an American symptom of why we’re doomed.

The species is going down because sedentism and civilization are based on simple forms of human greed, beginning with ‘wanting a better life for one’s children’, and ending in the vicious cycle of concentrated power and money stopping at nothing to keep rich and powerful interests entrenched.

Democracy, and liberal democratic processes, checked this tendency briefly, sometimes and for some people. (Not for slaves or the indigenous, but for a certain breed of white male anyway.) Goodness broke out. Some tolerance. Some justice. But you can pretty much kiss all that goodbye. Nobody important gives a fuck about democracy anymore. If it stands in the way, democracy will be subverted, massaged, dressed up like a brainwashed whore, disappeared, or murdered in the streets failing all the rest.

Staying in the Empire briefly, take a look at the all the little voter suppression and intimidation dances that surround and change the outcome of elections these days. Take a look at what Mitch the Turtle McConnell said about his own evil blocking of Obama’s Supreme Court nominee “in an election year”, and how he’d feel oh so different if Trump got a vacancy next year. Pure naked partisan double standard, freely admitted with no sense of shame. Fuck your democracy. This is how we run things. Eat your citizenship and shut up if you know what’s good for you.

(As an aside, the Trump administration is now marketing methane, with no sense of irony whatsoever, as “freedom gas”. Really. I wonder if it works on Christians as well as Jews.)

But the proximate cause for this rant didn’t happen in the Merkin Empire, or even in China next to ethnic cleansing and riots over Hong Kong. It happened in Brazil, a pretty nice democracy where an election was stolen outright, the probable winner jailed on bogus charges before he could even run. A more studied and vicious version of Lock Her Up.

Why did this happen? Because the local rich and powerful had had enough of this democracy shit and wanted to put things right by their own completely corrupt standards.

Glenn Greenwald, a hero in the class of Sanders and King, broke the story. He lives down there mostly.

If you want to know more, you can go:
direct to the source, or read a secondary mainstream summmary, or do what I did and listen to an interview with Mr. Greenwald. For extra credit, check out the depraved lengths the Elites will go to, when anyone just dares to tell the cold truth about their shenanigans.

The little individualized personal greed that began in basic agriculture has metastasized into a self-perpetuating and mindless virus that will consume the world we live in, by burning it to death in fucking freedom gas, nuking it into oblivion, letting the logic of capitalism lead us over the brink into AI superminds rolling right over biology, or twenty other ways. The exact mechanics will be a footnote and a curiosity in the last book ever written. Should we ever even get as far as Jay Inslee’s zero emissions wonderland winning out over Mike Pence’s ‘hey we can drill in the melted Arctic now!’, some other facet of the real problem will rise up and smack us back to dust anyway.

Happy Tuesday.